Another of my intimates of those days was Charles Borgeaud, who had come up from Geneva with the Swiss plan for a confederation of nations, a sound and excellent document, which I suppose was filed away with the multitudes of plans which flooded the Conference in those days. I was so excited by seeing about me so many of these old acquaintances and friends that I attempted to get them together for lunch one day—Seignobos, Madame Marillier, Steed, Louis Lapique, all that I could put my hands on. The result gave me a melancholy sense of what twenty-five years can do, particularly a twenty-five years ending in such a catastrophe as they had all been going through, to take the edge off once keen friendships. A more satisfactory revival of past and gone associations came from meeting numbers of former professional friends who were filling one or another post. Here were William Allen White and Auguste Jaccaci; here was Ray Stannard Baker, the head of the American press delegation, one of the few Americans having an easy entree to the President himself, conducting his difficult post with fine judgment and an absolute fairness which silenced the tongues of some of the most bumptious and political-minded correspondents. “How can you bully so straight a chap as Ray Baker?” a correspondent anxious for a special privilege said disconsolately in my hearing one day. There were hours when it seemed like a gathering in the office of the old _American Magazine_, so natural and intimate it was.